Champlain Names Mount Desert

In early September of sixteen hundred and four, a French explorer named Samuel de Champlain was sailing this coast when his ship struck a rock ledge near an island of tall, bare peaks. He was part of an expedition led by the sieur de Monts, probing the coastline of what the French called Acadia. Looking up at the mountains before him, Champlain noticed that their summits were stripped of trees, nothing but bald granite rock.

And so he wrote in his journal the name that would stick for centuries. L'Isle des Monts Deserts. The island of the barren, or deserted, mountains.

That French name, Mont Desert, is why this place is called Mount Desert Island to this day, though most people now pronounce it dessert, like the sweet course after dinner. Champlain would go on to found the city of Quebec four years later and is remembered as the father of New France. But his brief encounter with these bald peaks gave the island a name that has outlasted empires.

The next time you look up at the bare pink summit of Cadillac Mountain, remember, that treeless rock is exactly what a French sailor saw more than four hundred years ago.